At a time when the place of Muslims in German society is being disputed, this book explores how four contemporary German writers of Muslim backgrounds - Zafer Senocak, SAID, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Navid Kermani - point beyond identity politics and suggest new ways of thinking about religion and community. Twist highlights both the spirituality and the cosmopolitanism of these authors, bringing their thought into dialogue with the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. More...

This volume presents the intellectual autobiographies of fourteen leading scholars in the fields of history, literature, film and cultural studies who have dedicated a considerable part of their career to researching the history and memories of France during the Second World War. Based in five different countries, Margaret Atack, Marc Dambre, Laurent Douzou, Hilary Footitt, Robert Gildea, Richard J. Golsan, Bertram M. Gordon, Christopher Lloyd, Colin Nettelbeck, Denis Peschanski, Renée Poznanski, Henry Rousso, Peter Tame, and Susan Rubin Suleiman have played a crucial role in shaping and reshaping what has become a thought-provoking field of research. This volume, which also includes an interview with historian Robert O. Paxton, clarifies the rationales and driving forces behind their work and thus behind our current understanding of one of the darkest and most vividly remembered pages of history in contemporary France.

Manu Braganca and Fransiska Louwagie (eds). Ego-histories of France and the Second World War: Writing Vichy (Palgrave, 2018).

The Cantigas de Santa Maria, a collection of over 400 songs praising the Virgin Mary and narrating her miracles, constitutes one of the most important collections of vernacular songs ('vernacular' in this case being Galician) to survive with their music from before 1300. The collection was assembled at the direction of Alfonso X 'The Learned', king (1252-84) of Castile and Leon, who may also have composed some of the texts and even melodies. The musical notation in the three surviving musically-notated manuscripts conveys the melodies without diffuculty to a modern reader. However, some aspects of rhythmic inter-pretation (i.e. the relative duration of the notational symbols, of which there are over 150) are still a matter for debate

Germanistik in Ireland: Jahrbuch der / Yearbook of the Association of Third-Level Teachers of German in Ireland (the Yearbook) is the official publication of the Association of Third-Level Teachers of German in Ireland. It appears once a year. Each member of the Association of Third-Level Teachers of German in Ireland receives one copy of the Yearbook as part of their membership. The aim of the Yearbook is to provide a forum for the publication of research in German Studies in the broadest and most inclusive sense, comprising literary and cultural studies, history and Landeskundeof the German-speaking countries, applied and theoretical linguistics, German as a Foreign Language and Fachdidaktikincluding German for special purposes, and other related areas.

This book highlights the centrality of the autobiographical enterprise to Italian women’s writing through the twentieth century—a century that has frequently been referred to as the century of the self. Ursula Fanning addresses the thorny issue of essentialism potentially involved in underlining links between women’s writing and autobiographical modes, and ultimately rejects it in favor of an argument based on the cultural, linguistic, and literary marginalization of women writers within the Italian context.

This volume opens with the bold suggestion that the seven deadly sins constitute a key to the structure of Inferno and Paradiso as well as Purgatorio. It ends with a discussion of cowardice (not strictly a deadly sin) in Inferno III, followed by a look at Dante himself in the light of all the capital vices. In between, each of the seven is focused on in turn. Intellectual pride is cited as the reason for Cavalcanti’s absence from the Commedia, while – separately – the pride cantos in Purgatorio are read as a reconstruction of the individual’s passage from pride to piety. Read more ->

Conduct literature for and about women represents a very broad but still little-studied body of works that is essential for the understanding of the cultural construction of femininity. Conduct texts, being both prescriptive and descriptive sources, offer a fascinating account of and insight into the changing role of women across the centuries according to the needs of society. On the one hand, they record ideological constructions, models, and aspirations, and on the other they reflect contemporary realities, norms, and customs. The essays in this volume aim to trace some of the main features of conduct literature in the Italian tradition, from the last decades of the fifteenth century to the post-unification period.

Selena Daly’s work is the first comprehensive study of Futurism during the First World War period. In this book, she examines the cultural, political, and military engagement of the Futurists with the war effort, both on the battlefields and on the home front.

Beginning with the outbreak of war in 1914, Italian Futurism and the First World War provides vivid accounts of Futurist experiences through an analysis of previously unpublished material, including letters, diaries, and military documents as well as newspapers, magazines, and popular novels. Her focus on Futurist protagonists such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Emilio Settimelli, and lesser known figures such as Giuseppe Steiner and Ennio Valentinelli greatly extends our knowledge of the movement. Daly’s timely and detailed analysis challenges long-held assumptions about Futurist activity during the war and offers new insights for both the non-specialist and specialist alike.

Selena Daly (2016) Italian Futurism and the First World War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Our era seems beset by the peddling of ‘post truth’ politics, by the derision of critical voices as purveyors of ‘fake news’ and by the convulsive hold of chauvinistic nationalisms and populist agendas. Against that backdrop, ‘Ressentiment’ is a notion that deserves renewed attention and analysis. This book’s reappraisal focuses on the past/present predicament of critical discourse, pointing up some of the many ways and contexts in which ‘dissensus’ is limited or disabled either by ‘Ressentiment’ or by accusations of ‘Ressentiment’.

This collective volume of nine essays, bringing together researchers from France and Ireland and edited by Derval Conroy and Jean-Paul Pittion, is part of an ongoing project led by the editors which aims to contribute to scholarship concerning the early modern French book. As the editors point out in the Foreword, the volume is informed by the belief that ‘the role the printed works of the period played as cultural instruments which reflect, shape or support the ideas, prejudices or tastes of the milieus which created and received them, cannot be properly evaluated if the material and commercial conditions in which they were produced are not taken into account’.

Derval Conroy and Jean-Paul Pittion (Ed.). (2016) Print Culture in Early Modern France. Dublin: Irish Journal of French Studies.

This collection of essays investigates the darker aspects of Diderot, writer, art critic, philosopher and encyclopédiste. The chapters focus on the schism between positive images of the Enlightenment and an undercurrent of disorder, transgression and clandestine intellectual and social practices. Diderot’s role in this fissure is critically scrutinised through an analysis of the interface between Enlightenment and its dark side. In his reticence before authority and censorship, in the richness and complexity of his literary and philosophical works, in the emotional conflict of his theatre, or in his innovative aesthetic vision, Diderot consistently evokes the darker side of the Enlightenment.

Examining perception in the discourses of 1900, this study aims to uncover some of the less apparent emotional undercurrents of scientific theories of understanding. "Connections" may be either theories of society and social action, (ambivalent ties as described by Simmel and Plessner, repressive ones, as we see in Freud), or they may be a manner of narrating the self and its links, emotional and intellectual, to the world. They can be energetic in the sense of Schopenhauer's will, motivational in the sense of Nietzsche's will-to-power, empathic in the sense of early phenomenology, or object-driven and therefore ethical, in the sense of Husserl. They can be suggestive - adapting the Heraclitean notion of flow, as we can see at different points in writers as diverse as Husserl, William James and Henri Bergson, or declarative, in the sense of Arnold Gehlen, for whom connections are institutional - human beings, with a reduced instinct in comparison to other creatures, forge links to the world by means of the culture they produce. Connections can be many things at once - physiological effects of perception - or psychological responses to perception. In this study, they are seen as implicit, but nonetheless important discursive forces.

Proposing a new methodological approach to documenting languages spoken in multilingual societies, this book retraces the investigation of one unique linguistic space, the Creole varieties referred to as Takitaki in multilingual French Guiana. It illustrates how interactional sociolinguistic, anthropological linguistic, discourse analytical and quantitative sociolinguistic approaches can be integrated with structural approaches to language in order to resolve rarely discussed questions systematically (what are the outlines of the community, who is a rightful speaker, what speech should be documented) that frequently crop up in projects of language documentation in multilingual contexts. The authors argue that comprehensively documenting complex linguistic phenomena requires taking into account the views of all local social actors (native and non native speakers, institutions, linguists, non-speakers etc.), applying a range of complementary data collection and analysis methods and putting issues of ideology, variation, language contact and interaction centre stage. This book will be welcomed by researchers in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, fieldwork studies, language documentation and language variation and change.

Proposing a new methodological approach to documenting languages spoken in multilingual societies, this book retraces the investigation of one unique linguistic space, the Creole varieties referred to as Takitaki in multilingual French Guiana. It illustrates how interactional sociolinguistic, anthropological linguistic, discourse analytical and quantitative sociolinguistic approaches can be integrated with structural approaches to language in order to resolve rarely discussed questions systematically (what are the outlines of the community, who is a rightful speaker, what speech should be documented) that frequently crop up in projects of language documentation in multilingual contexts. The authors argue that comprehensively documenting complex linguistic phenomena requires taking into account the views of all local social actors (native and non native speakers, institutions, linguists, non-speakers etc.), applying a range of complementary data collection and analysis methods and putting issues of ideology, variation, language contact and interaction centre stage. This book will be welcomed by researchers in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, fieldwork studies, language documentation and language variation and change.